If the City Council gets its way on a plan to lighten up on some low-level crimes, the city's little-known administrative court system would face a heavy burden.
The council introduced a package of eight criminal-justice reform bills Monday that would create civil penalties for quality-of-life crimes such as public urination and public consumption of alcohol. The compromise, hashed out over 10 months between the council and Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration, would not eliminate those criminal punishments, but would give police officers the option to slap offenders with a civil penalty instead.
Business leaders and civil-rights advocates issued statements of cautious support for an agreement that has emerged out of a rare point of contention between the reform-hungry council and the administration, which stands behind its "broken windows" strategy of prosecuting low-level quality-of-life crimes.
"The business community trusts Police Commissioner Bratton and his team to judge whether proposed legislation would put our city and its citizens at risk,"said Partnership for New York City President and CEO Kathryn Wylde.
Under the new rules, police officers would have the option to issue civil summonses rather than criminal ones in open-container cases, by far the NYPD's most prevalent summons. The package would lighten penalties for littering, general noise violations and breaking park rules.
The move to civil penalties would also shift a hefty backlog of unresolved summons cases out of state criminal courts and into the city's Office of Administrative Hearings and Trials, which conducts fewer than 300,000 hearings each year but processes roughly 750,000 summonses. NYPD issued nearly 117,000 summonses for open containers of alcohol in 2014 and almost 30,000 for public urination.
"We are now going to transfer that to OATH, an agency that for years has been ineffective," Councilman James Vacca, D-Bronx, said at a council hearing on the package.
He doubted that the office, which adjudicates environmental violations, Taxi and Limousine Commission hearings and disputes involving city employees, is up to the job.
"I'm concerned about OATH and the capacity of OATH to administer a program like this," he said.
But Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said that OATH will be sufficiently staffed and funded for the undertaking.
"It is a big endeavor, and obviously it's going to be a shift of focus and resources," Mark-Viverito said. The council has yet to do a fiscal impact statement, but Mark-Viverito said the council and administration are "committed" to bolstering OATH's coffers.
"We will provide more resources and there will be ongoing oversight to make sure that they have the support necessary in order to implement it," she said.
OATH defended itself, saying it turns out decisions in four days after hearing a case, on average.
"OATH has proven experience taking over new caseloads while staying true to its mission of providing fair and impartial hearings, and OATH does not have a backlog in issuing its hearing or appeal decisions," a spokeswoman said in a statement.
Unlike state criminal courts, OATH does not guarantee a right to counsel, which could render many defendants unrepresented.
Communities United for Police Reform's Monifa Bandele worries the civil penalty approach could potentially entangle New Yorkers in a "predatory system."
"The details are critical, and areas that must be further examined include the need to ensure due process and access to counsel in administrative courts, and economic protections for New Yorkers," she said. Some reform groups argue that the police already have discretion not to bring criminal charges, and thus the council's reform would not change anything for minority New Yorkers, who bear the brunt of enforcement.
Mark-Viverito did not commit to including the right to counsel in the package Monday. "Those are things that have to be looked at," she said. "Obviously there's a lot of costs to that, but that was not part of the conversation at this point."